Book Image

Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide

By : INNES BORKWOOD
Book Image

Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide

By: INNES BORKWOOD

Overview of this book

Creating video games has traditionally been a long and complicated process, requiring years of experience and a vast array of skills. However, with the introduction of comprehensive game-development toolkits such as Stencyl, the fun has returned to the art of game-creation ‚Äì anyone who has the desire to create their own video game can now do so with almost any desktop computer and a free software download from the Internet!Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide will put you on the fast-track to learning the essentials of the powerful Stencyl game-development toolkit. You will develop a complete, ready-to-publish video game including in-game advertising, by following the clear, step-by-step tutorials, supported by numerous screenshots and practical examples.This book will guide you through all the important steps required to develop and publish your video game. Starting with the installation and testing of the Stencyl toolkit, you will very quickly advance to the fun and exciting process of creating a playable game. The step-by-step tutorials will guide you from a blank screen, right through to giving your game that final polish and sharing it with the rest of the world. Whilst developing your feature-complete video game, you will learn how to easily detect collisions in your game using Stencyl's built-in physics engine. You'll discover how to use the powerful animation tools included in Stencyl's toolkit, and you'll find out how to make your game shine with sounds and visual special effects. You will also discover how Stencyl makes it easy to utilize the touch-screen and accelerometer features of smartphones and tablet computers. You will learn all the essential skills required to develop a video game from scratch ‚Äì right through to publishing a game on the Internet and testing games  on the most popular mobile devices.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development Beginner's Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Examining platform differences


When designing a game for use on a mobile device, we need to take into account a number of considerations relating to the form of the device, the way that the user holds it and interacts with it. We may also need to take other issues into consideration — mobile devices are usually far less powerful than desktop computers and laptops, so we need to be careful to ensure that our game will not slow down due to intensive processing of graphics. Following is a list of some of the issues that we need to consider when developing for mobile devices:

  • Large or numerous graphics can quickly deplete a mobile device's memory capacity

  • Too many onscreen actors can slow a game down so that it is no longer playable

  • The player is unlikely to have a keyboard or mouse with which to control the game

  • The mobile device may have a small screen, making it difficult for the player to see important gameplay elements and controls

  • Mobile games can be stopped and restarted at any time, such...